truck me, that she yanked the door open one
day. She was, apparently, showing some one about her office. "All
that," she said, waving her hand toward my case, "practically
untouched; and mountains besides. I don't know how I'm to get away
with it. I suppose I'll have to do a couple every night." I don't
know what time it was, but the light was going and the young lady had
got into bed when she began to read me, propped up against her knees.
She yawned now and then and sighed repeatedly as she shifted back my
pages. I thought I noticed that her, knees swayed, just perceptibly,
at times. Then suddenly my support sank to one side; I started to
slide, and would have plunged to the floor, very nearly pulling her
after me, if the disturbance had not as suddenly caught the young lady
back into wild consciousness, and she grabbed me and her knees and the
slipping bedclothes all in a lump. Shortly after this she turned back
to see how I ended, and then went to sleep comfortably, lights out.

I did not see the report the young lady wrote of me, but I had occasion
to think that she declared I was rather stupid. However, I got another
reading. I was given next to a young man, not, so I understood, a
regular reader, but a member of the advertising department who was
frequently called on to help weed out manuscript, who took me home with
him and threw me onto a couch littered with books and papers. Here I
stayed for ever so long. One day I heard the young man say to his
wife, nodding toward me: "I ought to try to get that unfortunate thing
off my hands before my vacation, but I never seem to get around to it."
As, alack-a-day! he did not get around to me before that occasion, I
went, packed in the bottom of a trunk, with the young man and his wife
on their annual holiday. In my pitchy gaol I had, of course, no means
of calculating the flight of time, but when I next saw the light, after
what seemed to me an interminable spell, I appeared to be the occasion
of some excitement. The young man brought me up after several vigorous
dives into the bottom of the trunk, as his wife was saying with much
energy: "Well, of course, you can do as you please, but if I were you
I'd telegraph an answer right straight back that I did not propose to
spend my vacation working for them. The idea! After all you do!"
"Oh, well," was the young man's reply, "some poor dog of an author
wrote the thing, and it's only right that he should have so